Anger Strays,Fear Refrains: The Differential Effect of Negative Emotions on Consumers’ Ethical Judgments

Although various factors have been studied for their influence on consumers’ ethical judgments, the role of incidental emotions has received relatively less attention. Recent research in consumer behavior has focused on studying the effect of specific incidental emotions on various aspects of consumer decision making. This paper investigates the effect of two negative, incidental emotional states of anger and fear on ethical judgment in a consumer context using a passive unethical behavior scenario (i.e., too much change received). The paper presents two experimental studies. Study 1 focuses on the interaction of moral intensity (amount of change) and incidental emotion state in predicting the ethical judgment while study 2 investigates the underlying causal mechanism behind the process, using a mediation analysis. The results reveal a significant interaction between moral intensity and incidental emotion. Specifically, individuals in the state of incidental fear exhibit higher levels of ethical judgment as the moral intensity increases as compared to individuals in the state of incidental anger. Further, perceived control is found to mediate the relationship between emotional state and ethical judgment under higher moral intensity condition.     

Export Performance of China: A Constant Market Share Analysis

In the light of the fact that there has been substantial growth in China's exports in last three decades, particularly after China joined the WTO in 2001, this article investigates the major sources of China's export performance during 2002-2014 by using the constant market share (CMS) model. In this study, exports are further decomposed in three categories based on their technological intensity using Lail (2000) classification on 3 digit SITC Revision-3 data provided by UN Comtrade via WITS database. The categories are high technology, medium technology and low technology. It is found that growth of China's exports has, moreover, remained above world exports growth in all three categories during the period of study. The analysis reveals that export performance is mainly attributed to 让s competitive strength in the global market, though decreasing trend has been observed in the competitiveness of all three categories. Increasing cost of labor and appreciating RMB could be the causes behind decreasing competitiveness of Chinese exports. Product structure effect, on an average, has turned out to be negative in all the categories which is the most disturbing aspect of China's export performance. On the other hand, geographical structure effect has positive impact on export performance of high-technology based exports whereas it has negative impact on export performance of low-technology and medium-technology based exports. China being the world's largest exporter, decreasing competitiveness and wrong product structure effect could adversely influence its export performance in particular and its growth in general.     

Some Surprising Facts About the Concentration of Trade Across Commodities and Trading Partners

The present paper documents unexplained concentration in trade. Bernard et al. (Producer Dynamics: New Evidence from Micro Data, 2009, University of Chicago Press) have documented concentration at the level of the firm and in exports. Taking a step forward, we document trade volume concentration at the level of nations and in both exports and imports. Firm level concentration has been relatively easy to explain in terms of models of heterogeneous‐firm models with entry costs in both the domestic and foreign markets. But as we shall see, the concentration at the level of the nation, especially in imports if not exports, turns out to be far more difficult to explain.